With the development of network technologies and information appliance industries, the originally purely functional household appliances can now exchange data with a network. This type of household appliance, which can exchange information with a network, is called information appliance, or networking appliance. An information appliance can receive data from a network, and return its status information to the network. The birth of information appliances enables a user to use the Internet to obtain the data of information appliances in a household, so that the user can monitor the status of the information appliances without going back home. Amidst these, there are some simple electrical appliances that only have a few logical functions, and these simple electrical appliances are called logical information appliances, such as electrical lamps, electrically controlled faucets, etc. These logical information appliances only need to receive some simple logical control commands (such as switch on and switch off), and to return status information (such as the status of the switch); thus complex information exchange is not necessary for these logical information appliances. Apart from these logical information appliances, there are also intelligent information appliances. An intelligent information appliance has more functions, thus typically requiring relatively complex information exchange and data processing. Intelligent information appliances include television, microwave, refrigerator, and compound devices with hub, etc.
The device address finding and coding protocols of current household networks are shown in FIG. 1. The protocol stack includes TCP/IP transport protocol A2 and network layer protocol XML templates-based SOAP etc. By publishing various URL addresses for its device information and service information etc., a device provides access path for other devices, thus allowing service functions to be provided.
In current household networks, although the names and usage of various coding protocols are different, most of these coding protocols use the XML syntax as their coding syntax.
Current technical schemes discussed above have the following disadvantages:
1. For existing household network protocol stacks, most of them use TCP/IP protocol stack. The IP network itself can not guarantee to provide strong safety insurance, hence higher protocols are needed in order to meet various safety demands, thus increasing the complexity of the protocols.
2. A household network is different from any network mode in the past. It penetrates into the various aspects of a user's family life, thus the user must hope that the network is safe and easy to use for all members in the family, and the network can not be accessed by other people or other people's devices outside the family. However, the structure of household networks is based on TCP/IP. Information appliances in these networks have IP addresses, so that a household network with a small local area network (LAN) can be connected to the Internet. The information appliances in this household network can access the Internet, while devices outside of the household network can also access these information appliances, which is very dangerous for the user if these devices are not the user's mobile terminals. If these information appliances can be accessed from the outside of the household network, private information of the user may be leaked. If external malicious information can reach the inside of the household network, the safety of the user's family is threatened.
3. The protocol stacks of current existing household networks often emphasize the real-time discovery of devices, but this discovery is based on an entire set of discovery mechanism of the IP protocol stack. Once devices mutually discover each other, they can communicate to each other independently. Since information appliances usually feature this kind of communication and mutual operation capabilities, some operations do not have to go through a home gateway, which leads to weakened management capability of the home gateway managing a digital household.
4. Current existing household networks all emphasize the intelligence of information appliances. In order to implement mutual discovery and service rendering of devices, each device not only needs to publish its information, but also needs to keep a service information list of other devices, thus increasing the cost of these appliances.
5. Current existing household networks mainly use IPv4 addresses. In the future application of household networks, the large amount of connected information appliances will inevitably meet the limitation of the limited IPv4 address resource. A household network may then use a mapping between IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses, or upgrade to IPv6 addresses, but both of the above solutions will bring unnecessary troubles to the user.